The Effect of Gender and Product Categories on Consumer Online Information Search

This article analyzes clickstream data collected from a popular online retailer to observe actual consumers’ information search behavior considering both gender and product categories. The results show, compared with males, females tend to be comprehensive processors, searching for more product information such as customer reviews and using various types of decision tools more while shopping online. Besides, unlike males, females searched more information and used decision tools significantly more when shopping for experience goods than when shopping for search goods. These results will help theorists and practitioners to better understand and predict consumer behavior in the online context.

Citation:

Jooyoung Park, Yeosun Yoon, and Byungtae Lee (2009) ,"The Effect of Gender and Product Categories on Consumer Online Information Search", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 8, eds. Sridhar Samu, Rajiv Vaidyanathan, and Dipankar Chakravarti, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 232-233.